QSS Faculty and Staff

Erik Peterson

Erik Peterson, currently a post-doctoral fellow in the Program in Quantitative Social Science, recently accepted an offer to become Assistant Professor of Political Science at Texas A&M University. After undergraduate education at Northwestern University, where Erik wrote a thesis under the supervision of Professor Jamie Druckman, Erik received his doctorate in political science from Stanford University. He has been at Dartmouth since the fall of 2017.

Among other things, Erik is working on projects that seek to identify the effects of cuts in newsroom reporting on democracy. Erik is also conducting research with Assistant Professor of Government, and QSS Director of Undergraduate Research, Sean Westwood on projects designed to identity the origins of affective polarization.

According to Professor Westwood, "Erik exemplifies the kind of scholar we are trying to foster within QSS: a social scientist who uses cutting-edge methods to explore major questions."

William Clark, Head of the Department of Political Science at Texas A&M, described Erik as "energetic, well-trained, and extremely prolific." He suggested that Erik "will play an important role in our recently created research program in Political Behavior and Political Institutions and should also have lots of opportunities to collaborate with scholars in Psychology, Communication Studies, and Behavioral Economics."

QSS congratulates Erik on his new faculty position! Erik will be starting at A&M in the summer of 2018 and until that time will be working on his research at Dartmouth.

Erik Peterson, a postdoctoral fellow in the Program in Quantitative Social Science, has published an article in Journal of Politics on the role of information in partisan voting. Erik received his doctorate in political science from Stanford University in 2017 and started his fellowship at Dartmouth in August. Using a survey experiment and an observational study of voting in Congressional elections, Erik's article shows that more informative media environments reduce voters' reliance on partisanship to evaluate politicians. Erik's dissertation at Stanford was titled "Causes and Consequences of News Media Content." At Dartmouth, Erik will work on a project examining the political consequences of the widespread layoffs of newspaper journalists that have occurred over the past decade.